Forget About Babson, Go to Northwestern

Last week, we talked about Babson College's 17 year string of domination over the U.S. News & World Report's rankings for entrepreneurship education in U.S. colleges and universities. Not so fast, says Howard Marks, the founder of a Los Angeles based startup accelerator (StartEngine) who first made a name for himself as the founder of Activision—the world's first independent video game publisher (remember Chopper Command and Pitfall from the early '80s?).

Marks pulled data from AngelList to help him identify schools with an excellent track record for churning out entrepreneurs and startups that were not being combed through by everyone else looking to land the next Mark Zuckerberg. That meant schools not named Stanford, MIT, Harvard—or even Babson.

He found that Northwestern University topped the list with 31 founders whose median investment per founder was $10.4 million. The biggest success story to come from the Chicago-area school was Groupon founder and CEO Andrew Mason who has raised approximately $1.1 billion (Marks used median instead of average to avoid outliers like Mason skewing the results).

Northwestern was followed by (in order): University of Maryland, Princeton University, Stanford University and the University of Chicago. In total, 27 schools had a median investment per founder of $1 million or more.